


Mereel and

by Izzerslololol



Series: Mereel and the Galaxy [7]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Clone Wars (2003) - All Media Types, Star Wars: Republic Commando Series - Karen Traviss, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Clones, Drabble, Drabble Collection, F/M, Gen, Mando'a, OTP 20 Challenge, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-10
Updated: 2013-03-30
Packaged: 2017-12-13 15:56:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 20
Words: 7,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/826087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Izzerslololol/pseuds/Izzerslololol
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>ARC Lt. N-07 loves as deeply as any man, but the target of his affections remains hidden from all—even himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Finding Love

**Author's Note:**

> Preface:
> 
> I’m taking vast liberties with this drabble challenge.
> 
> Mostly, though, I am actually writing towards an OTP in these. It’ll be unclear in the beginning, but by the end it should be clear.
> 
> We’ll see. This is an experiment for me, mostly. If I fail to make the mark … oops. lol
> 
> Some notes and explanation further down under the cut. I suggest reading the drabbles before the explanation. Ok? ok. This will probably be edited to add things I’ve forgotten to mention, or whatever notes.
> 
> Also switching 7 and 20, otherwise I reveal the answer too soon.
> 
> Edit: These seem to get darker and less and less Mereel-like as it goes. Um. It’s not really intentional, but given the material and the other half of the pairing, I guess I’m taking a lot of liberties.
> 
> Ergo it’s an experiment and once I’m done I really want… well. Comments. Criticisms and the like. Yeah. So. Thanks for reading, in advance.
> 
> I guess one day I’ll write some kind of meta. In any event, the explanation of the other half of the pairing can be found further down. I’d suggest reading through them, if you haven’t, before getting to the explanation.

She glides across the floor in bare feet and a slip of a nightshirt. Glitterlace sparkles over her curves under open air and looses about her shoulders, pooling, forgotten. Her skin warms under his touch, soft, light, heavy, rough. Her heart flutters beneath tender fingertips and she dances, breathes against him and away, a blur of green, of blue, of pink, of red.

Like the pull of the moons she moves him, drawing him out from rigid orbit to sway under fine wisps of parted breaths that speak his name to the sky. That draw heated words against him with painted, natural, kiss-bruised, untouched lips.

The whispers ache in his chest, creep down in shivers against him, the swell that gives and flows, enveloped in heat and wandering touches. His name on his skin and she floods his senses with heat and scent, always different, always new, but always the same and similar and warm, so warm, in different ways that stems the tide of things he remembers, always remembers, but forgets beneath the promise of her touch.

She whispers across the broken, whole, grime-coated, freshly polished, wooden, metal, stone, plasti floor of the room, hall, roof, street, barefoot and naked, clothed and restricted, different, the same, hands around his fragile heart with promises of love, love me, here and now and tomorrow and yesterday.

And who is he to resist?


	2. Waltz

Mereel navigates the ballroom in priceless boots he'd _borrowed_ earlier that night. They were suited uniquely for the occasion, and procurement came as a result of stripping a room for evidence after a short negotiation came to an abrupt halt with the business end of a blaster. It made a fine gift of apology for rudeness from the dead man in a bag.

Hours later, he finds himself under arch of artificial night sky and soft music that tempers the atmosphere in steady tones, on: one, two three, one, two three. Across the sea and fold of expensive fabric and shifting bodies glimmers a silk under that catches his eye. His attention comes to rest on her—woven hair and midnight skin, sharp eyes and dress that shimmers across the spectrum under starlight. She moves, as if sensing his stare, and scans with sudden interest the dancers and live band that failed to entertain her previously. 

Across the sea of moving bodies their eyes meet. She holds his gaze on one, two three, one, two three. The set of his shoulders, strong and tall under _borrowed_ clothes that, he knows, fits him better than the late man in a bag. He edges a smile.

The music changes as her brows raise and she returns the smile. It's a confirmation, an invitation that draws him out to wade amidst the dancers, human, near human, and humanoid alike.

At two steps away, he stills with hand raised in request and slight bow at the waist. Submissive. Formal. Reposed and respectful to the lady's decision—customary to the system. Her eyes draw down, caressing him from head to foot and again. He fights the urge to primp, to fidget, to strut. In silent ascent, her hand slides into his. Palm to palm, they venture away from the safety of walls under arch of artificial night sky. She begins to glow, radiant—as if dusted with gold and stardust.

She falls in step at his lead as they take the floor, heart in his chest, on one, two three, one, two three. The sea parts, and under shifting sky the flutter of their hearts sync to the rhythm of the dance. Her delicate palm warms his, her eyes caress his own. He's done this dance many times before, and he will many times again, but this one lingers in his mind—a quiet realization whose meaning will reach him many years from now.

Mereel sets the feeling aside and focuses on the shift of shimmer and silk and her painted lips as she smiles, close, closer, and then away—on one, two three, one two three.

And with a spin and a twirl she returns. Her breath against his lips—one, two three—breast to breast, the sky glows, flows down into the shimmer silk of her whispering gown, and the dance falls to a close—on: one, two three.

He presses a kiss to the pulse of her palm and she smiles. Steps. Draws him away from the crowd and out under true night to lead him through the steps of the dance he knows so well, doesn't know at all, revels in learning and relearning in shaky breaths and delicate touches.

On one, two three, one, two three.


	3. Kiss Without Lips

Ah.

There's a struggle against the straps, the hooks and clasps, of armored plates against the flight suit with its sensitive electronics woven into the fabric. She catches hold of his helmet—not for removal, but _leverage_ —and _clacks_ her own _buy'ce_ to his. 

Her body, contained inside the restrictive _beskar,_ trembles against him with her knees clamped, like a vice, painful, around his hips.

He can't get enough air, can't reach her skin, but that's okay. That's okay.

_Ah._

Her armor, painted with the colors of night and dawn and speckled with the constellations seen from an ancient Mandalore—a different planet in a different system, long lost and forgotten, save for this woman in glittering armor plates millenniums old and well cared for—jerks hard against the ties of the section of his flightsuit over his pelvis, the only barrier that separates him from her in the only place that matters.

_"Ah,"_ she hisses, relieved and tense and hot and soft all at once. He pushes inside and she squeezes her hands against the plating at his neck and their _buy'ce_ clack together again. She holds the _keldabe kiss_ as he thrusts her against the broken wall of a leveled city, them and it the remaining survivors of an over zealous empire's demolition.

And her armor...

She feathers around him. He pushes harder, swells and recedes, and her elbows hook around his neck, gloves pawed against his helmet to strain for further leverage, legs tight around his hips, her T-visor staring into his and the constellations glittering beneath him.

She cries out and the pull against his neck _hurts_ and the muscles contract painfully around him, and before he expects it the tide sweeps him over the edge after her. 

His knees give out and they slide to the floor, with her still in his lap and helmets pressed tight to each other. She shudders, with a broken laugh or cry, the audio makes it hard for him to hear—until he realizes he's chuckling, too. Her armor glints in his eye as his helmeted head slides to her neck and he admires the galaxy imprinted on her body before they separate for the last time.


	4. Magic

He wants to say it never happened.

Lies come easy, like breaths in a run, or small, careful, sips of water afterwords that choke in his throat and bubble in his lungs. He clamps his lips shut against the truth because the truth is his and no one else's. And he brashes about with confidence and strut, and what can he do but be himself every day?

He thinks about it in the shower and to his bed—luxuries that strike him as things he never needed but oh, does he love with careless abandon and languishes within and upon between gentle caresses of bumped permanently painted skin.

The idea clutches in him but he smiles and laughs, and follows the loosed towel about his waist as it rises through the air. Floats to the woman in his bed. She led him to her for this brief repose and She wants him to delve, just once, in what a wizard can do. In what this wizard will do. 

Sobered by the endless running and crashed into him, and then away. Worn down between dashing skirmishes and scattered explosions and an assassination gone terribly, terribly, _right._ Taking refuge, there, in his bed with his towel in her hand and her eyes upon him, and he can't help but stand at attention—all of him.

"Like what you see?" he asks, but he knows what the answer will be. He doesn't need to have her powers, her space magic, her mind opener, to read the look in her eyes, on her lips, as her tongue darts out to wet them and swallow. He can only brace himself for the gravity of her presence to drag him down from orbit and, maybe, he'll get a turn to taste her after she's burned him through.

"Yes," she says, and even with the skills and the talents the reaction is the same and similar and wholly different and uniquely hers as she holds out a palm and. 

A room between them, she takes him apart with her hands.

He's been such a good boy lately, he thinks between the swell and fold of stars behind his eyes. It's good to be rewarded.


	5. Late Night

He prefers the late hours planet side, when the sky is cleared of reflective light and he can see out into the black, into the heart of the galaxy, where the spirits of dead gods sparkle in starlight. 

Archaic. Their names a dead dialect, and it sounds like music in his heart.

He prefers the press of city life, especially at night, if there is one where he's deployed. 

There usually is.

Moving bodies gather in one place to relieve the stresses of the day-to-day. The corporate workforce crawl of fifty-odd years, give or take rates for the average sentient's life, wears down on the populace—everywhere, on nearly every planet. It makes for easy pickings. Lets him blend into a crowd or stand out amongst them. 

He prefers the latter—to laugh, to smile, to attract the attention he craves, as he follows the pedestrian traffic into a brightly lit cantina with an open sky and ear pounding music.

The drinks come down and he's away for a while, eyes to the open night and glimmer. More drinks and far away, and finally She comes down to him, soft touches and incessant fingers and an invitation to dance through another's hands, and he let's himself be dragged to the center of the floor. The stars shine down and his hands slide against her sweat-slicked skin as she dances against him in all the ways the galactic core would turn their stomachs at. Her skin is any color, every color, under the spot lamps and blended memories sliding up against each other. He presses his lips to her neck, her ear, her mouth, and she takes him home. 

He prefers these kinds of nights, and he grabs them when he can.


	6. Marriage Proposal

It happened again.

Breath caught in lips high strung and hands above his brow to slip into his hair. "Let's do it," she says, and he smiles as he pushes the bangs aside behind her ear. 

"You don't know what you're asking," he says, has said, will say again—and it's always the same: they don't know, if they did they'd never ask, and, either way, he never wanted them to.

But they did anyway, and it's happened again.

"I do," she says, said, laughs, and follows with a kiss or a frown and a smile with tears and the curve of her lower back pushes her thighs deeper into his lap and he breathes, sharp, through his nose. She smells good. She always smells good.

"Lavender," he says out loud and she stops her movement to look him in the eye, and he sees blue. Green. Hazel. Gray. Slits of the pupil or starred or oval or sphere. Lids painted, soft and warm or cold and cool, and what does he know except the name of the star of this system in the galaxy.

"I'm claimed," he admits, careful with the word, and sometimes it's met with a breath. With a clap of skin under angered palm, or brush of heated lips, or sometimes neither—to the pull of skin against the cloth of his slacks and the rise of restrained muscle movement to look to the floor, ceiling, sky, and a tremble of hand to fist to hand to mouth.

"We can run away," this one says. "You wouldn't be here with me if she didn't love you."

She loves me, he thinks, and he knows it to be true—truer than any lie he's told, any history he remembers but forgets under parted lips, and _oh._ If she had hands to slip on a ring, if she had breasts and thighs and mouth and body to worship, if she had heart he could touch with his hands barred by bone and sinew and blood, would he propose this thing that he feels in his heart when he looks into the stars.

But She can't and he isn't.

She isn't and he can't. 

So he fills his body with the calm soothes of another being, and another, and another, until they all blend together in memory to the one that holds him close and whispers nothing but wraps him in warmth and love that's fleeting and ill-suited to fill the hole brought by Her and only Her.

"I can't," he says, and it's true. There's no running, never any running. 

"I'm sorry," he says, and it's almost true. But it's not for her who sits upon his lap or stands with slap against his cheek or breasts against his arm and lips against his ears and he.

_Don't leave me._

He loves her and he cannot explain.

"Get out," she says and he does, and he moves on because it was nothing, it meant nothing. An outlet—warm touches and long nights and cold calls for short adventures behind tapcafs or ports or alleys and everywhere in between.

And he'd leave it all behind if she'd come down to join him in hand and flesh and.

He'd marry her if he could.


	7. Private Moment

His brothers didn't often catch the time to relax. Prudii knew this better than anyone, having kept a closer eye on each one of them more-so than some might have thought reasonable, but he could not care _less_ about how _some_ might consider his actions.

But now? Now he realized too late he'd intruded on something. Prudii didn't particularly hate secrets, one could go so far as to say he even _liked_ them—just not the kinds kept from brothers by brothers. Those kinds of secrets could only hurt the group, and he didn't appreciate them.

Yet there sat Mereel. _Just_ sitting. And staring, up, craned at the sky with a totally vacant look on his face. Prudii couldn't remember the last time he'd seen such an expression—which meant he never had. And judging from the empty bottles beside his brother, and the glowing datapad limp in his hands, there was some cause for concern. But only some, and nothing needed addressing immediately.

He decided to leave it for another night. Mereel deserved his privacy when he wanted it. His brother had given too much away in the day to day, and Prudii could—no, _would—_ respect that much.


	8. Infatuation

It’s worse every day.

Mereel can feel the split inside him that starts left-of-center and webs outward. He swallows it down in his drinks and his thrills and the high-lows of credit throws and dice rolls. What helps most he hates and loves and he can’t give it up but maybe he should.

He was never one to deny himself, and he knows every transgression is a promise and a gift and a burden and can’t mean anything more than what he allows. And no one can get through because the heart is full, but damaged.

It comes in waves.

Starts in his chest and blossoms out in hunger, in anger, in joy. Tensing his arteries and blowing his pupils wide. He licks his lips because they’re always dry, because he’s thirsty in the middle of a free fall, in the middle of a conversation, in the middle of an assassination. His heart sings and he can feel Her watching.

So he sets out, alone, to work with steady hands, brute force, and silver tongue. Always moving, always working, rarely stopping for rest or breath or both. And each operation, each mission, is a dedication—a declaration, a commitment. The city, town, station, transport, is, are, were, will be, his. He takes it, them, by force and persuasion and steady hands. They’ll fight the Imps’ influence for a little while and maybe, probably, eventually, they’ll succumb. But what matters is him.

His “on” hours are aptly named.

And the steady thrum of pleasure in his veins at his success, at his methodical destruction of previously believed impenetrable structures—figurative, and literal, and metaphorical, and _oh._

It fills him.

No one can really understand, so he doesn’t share—it’s not worth sharing, not yet. But the truth. The truth is…

She seeks him out in his off hours. In the time when he is down, when between the motions, between the steady push and pull, give and take, of breaking down people, places, and things, She’ll grip him by the throat and the groin and force him to his knees. She’ll bring him up between Her hands in another’s, She’ll strangle tight his heart and drag him under the fold, to full, to fill, to come and come and come again—one of many benefits successful destruction brings—and finally, run out and worn through, and nothing more to give, She leaves him in the warm embrace of another.

The truth is the truth. _And I need Her more and more._

Two sets of hands on his body and two sets of mouths and he shuts off his mind to settle in between the black and the blue and the scales of their skin sparkling in the dark room like stars. Forgets about it, about Her, about them, and about everything in between, for a little while. He laughs and he smiles and smiles and smiles and.

_Oh._ They whisper against his skin exalted exhalations that breach the air to speak Her name in tongues, confused for meaningless words of awe and broken hedonistic prayer, and that’s okay. _That’s okay._

Compelled with increasing intensity to take apart and invade and crush and devour and the hands rock him higher and higher and _oh._

He likes it better this way. Even if it is worse every day.


	9. Dreams

He floats on a bed of stars, rising and falling with the swelling, shimmering, tide around him in pinpricks of light, varied and crossing the spectrum of colors beyond his visual range. Above him stretches blue sky, the edges expand and contract in shallow breaths that warp the clouds into shapes recognized yet evade the tip of his tongue in words.

On the fine barrier of night and stars and sun and sky he rests, quiet, breathing the not-air of dreams with a hand in his—warm and cold and firm and soft and holding him suspended between and he can't see her, but she's always there. 

Even when he sleeps. Especially when he sleeps.

She's there at his most vulnerable in the deepest parts of himself, when his heart stretches high and his mind the tides below. And he holds on to these moments when he can see her face in the clouds and wonders at her grasp, and knows that when he opens his eyes he'll wake up alone.


	10. Light

Records are a funny thing.

As the saying goes, history is written by the victor—even in the smallest, most minuscule and insignificant battle—and the nature of perception makes it rare to find a historian truly unbiased. Which isn’t to say that neutral writings don’t exist, but even then… the context of their words, the _implied_ meaning versus the _defined_ and _proper,_ is often lost to time.

Mereel found the concept fascinating, but he’d never have embarked on the journey if. Well. It was the nature of the thing.

Even Mandalorians, with their gender-neutral language and their willingness to adopt any species into the fold, held their biases.

The old library he’s broken into sits under Imperial control. The disguise he’s used is good—the best of the best, like his brothers used to say—but nothing can explain away a dashingly handsome salt & pepper like him in a condemned, locked down and put out, records library in the ruins of _tome’tay yaim’kyrala._

_Tome’tay Yaim’kyrala_. A record of spoken history in language. It means Old Country—a phrase from a clan that never strayed from the absolute fringes bordering the unknown regions. It literally meant remembered home of the dead, but the colloquial meaning took a more colorful, less dramatic, appeal: one of the many Temporary Settlements given the name Mandalore—and that’s how it always was, _temporary,_ even if temporary could mean anywhere between a few months to a few centuries—of mandalorian clans until a _baslan shevla_ was called.

And now, in the shadows of a ruined and forgotten record hall, the information streams before him, like a miniature starburst before his eyes and between his hands.

She dances in his palm, weapons in hand, leading the siege that would take first a town, then a city, then the planet and eventually the system. The walls in her path would crumble, as they often did under the cry of the stars, and all would join or fold beneath her.

Even with the zealot-like vindication indicative of his people, many ancient _Mand’alore_ died, lost to time. Forgotten in _tome’tay yaim’kyrala_ , lost in condemned and locked out, put down, ruined archives to rot.

But he knew where she lie, and so he went—retrieving old legends of dead women kept hidden in the light of crystals that rest comfortably in his palm.

So much information stored in such a tiny glowing relic. It was a funny thing, how a mandalorian like him had to break into a ruin to steal his own history for safekeeping.


	11. Body Worship

On the sea of stars she writhes, muscles rippling and illuminated from below in holo-map blue. She throws her arms around his neck and crushes her lips to his. On the wall at his back, her booted feet fence in his hips at either side.

He stops her movement with a swift squeeze along the underside of her hips, a duck of his head from out between her arms, and a jerk upward of her thighs. She falls back… and disappears under the sea of blue lines and dotted stars. The galaxy shivers with the intrusion, the locked nav-map re-sorting the scattered holo-fabric of stars.

Mereel comes back to himself and jerks open her blouse with enough force to send the buttons ricocheting into the darkness. He tosses the fabric of her clothes to the floor, holding her wrists in one hand as he rakes his eyes over her.

Painted in the unnatural blue of the star map, skin slicked with a thin sheen of sweat that catches and reflects the light around her, she stares back at him with heavy-lidded eyes. Her body, naked and trembling, lays open to him—posed like a sacrifice to the slow spinning galaxy surrounding her.

He closes his eyes, licks his lips, and bends to press a reverent kiss to the dip of her abdomen, swallowing a star with the movement. Every brush of his lips is met with an exultant sigh, a shuddered breath, a whispered prayer to the universe. The stars sparkle in his eyes as he slowly kisses his way down, mapping the curves of her lower body and the expansion region with his tongue and teeth.

Upon reaching his destination, he takes a moment to admire her. Then he pushes a kiss against her curls and gets to work on shattering every carefully constructed facade of calm until she’s crying out with her thighs clamped around his head—her “little death,” as he’s heard it called on one of many planets, a sacrifice on the makeshift the bed of stars.


	12. Luxury

It’s in the throes of passion he sees Her face. The give and take and shatter of bodies between high-thread silk sheets a necessary constant to keep his mind together at the seams. He breathes high, low, the scent beneath the sweat and perfume of another feeding the hollow left-of-center.

Always temporary. Always calling to him to move, to fight, to thrill, to fall off buildings and run through fire and claim hearts and break bodies with hands and teeth and tongue and soul.

She watches him and he gives a good show, he knows.

And he’s rewarded in different ways, always tender or cruel, in caress or pain, in dramassian silk sheets or Merr-Sonn arms left in strange places, or a knife in the shoulder and an SP to the gut.

Or in accidental revelations, when he’s in the right position to see under cloud-cover the glint of Her body with unadorned eyes.

He loves Her, and love is a luxury he can’t afford to entertain. But he does it anyway, in little ways, in grand gestures, in sweeping actions, because he wants. He _wants._

And he’s never been one to deny himself.


	13. Storytelling

It was in the gaps, the jumps between people, places, and things, that Mereel could sit and consider and reflect on his choices. He didn’t make habit of regretting things—it wasn’t his way.

“At the start of everything, _Mand’alore be Ka’ra’se_ Chaos and Sloth met on the battlefield of stars, and out of their conflict birthed the galaxy. It is only through continuous struggle that life is maintained, and whole.”

He moved from place to place, constantly in motion, taking jobs as he went to stay afloat without drawing from the emergency funds he knew he had. Things were more interesting when he struggled.

“I once bedded a queen while her kingdom burned.”

He filled the hollow with stories that painted his life in great, grand, and whole strokes—adventurous and exciting and never, ever, slow. No one ever really found the gaps interesting, though the rest time and the lows were necessary to keep the highs _high._

“I earned these garments by fighting through the ranks of an arena-styled tournament. Nearly lost my arm, but I do like the color.”

The stories came easy enough—at home, out with friends, in cantinas and tapcafs and dinner parties and dances. And the women he pulled into his bed never quite matched the stories he told, but they would be enough, because they had to be—but never was.

But no one ever found that part interesting, either.


	14. Scars

The hum of the de-con field tingled his skin and burned against the weeping gashes across his arms. The wide transparisteel viewport of the medbay shone with blue, the blast-shields open to the streak of hyperspace.

Mereel collapsed half on to a gurney and dropped open the medical kit on the counter. He sterilized his hands, cut away his shirt as he dripped red over the floor, and got to work under the beating heart of the galaxy. Each wound needed careful, separate attention. Cleaning took time, the sharp jags of pain managed only with his teeth clenched around a guard and grunts in the lonely ship—he’d run low on pain-blockers on the way, and he only had enough to keep the edges dulled until he dropped out from the blue. He’ll have to ditch the ship in the safety of the next major hyperlane spaceport, pick up another kit, and head home.

 _Have to make it through the ride, first._ He knew his trail was clean, but it hadn’t hurt to keep the paranoia until he entered safe territory.

As he threaded the last stitch and slapped on the bacta patches, he eased out of his tense posture and deposited the dirtied tools into the medbay’s sink. From there, he rolled himself over to the sleep banquette pushed up against the window. Carefully, he nestled up against the cushions.

Transparisteel cooled against his forehead. The blue of hyperspace streaked through and painted his skin in its glow. He touched the recently procured compass hanging from a chain around his neck, its innards broken beyond repair. But it’s function extended beyond archaic navigation methods.

 _Found your gift._ He brushed a hand against the transparisteel. _Lead me on._

He leaned back, cradled in the corner of a counter, the banquette, and the window—and began the slow process of counting the raised pale lines that crossed his body, touched in tints of blue.

By the time he finished, he knew, he’d be out of the heart of the galaxy.


	15. Heirloom

Things. Ree’vodu didn’t keep many physical things, items or trinkets—or even trophies, like uncle Jaing—but he had plenty of stories. Adventures that, Venku surmised quietly as the forest passed around him on the short-burst speeder, could at best be labeled as _mostly true._ At worst was a story that seemed so bizarre, so outrageous, even compared besides the things uncle Bardan had promised _were_ true, Venku had trouble believing any of it.

Until he attached the blue and orange plate to his thigh and suddenly _knew._

And with it came a great pain that ached in his chest in sympathy, a sudden understanding of those quiet moments when he had caught Ree’vodu staring at the stars, a far-away impression of the galaxy superimposed in his uncle’s eyes.

And the story that was the least believable, the greatest farce, false, fabrication, was entirely true—hidden in the double meaning of everything but the coordinates.

The speeder came to a stop just shy of the boundary that separated the temperate zone from the southern poles of the south hemisphere of Mandalore. Venku kicked up dirt and dust and old dead moss as the speeder settled into the muck. The ground gave beneath his boots and he slipped down, down, down, into the earth that swallowed up the woman, the heroine, in Ree’vodu’s story.

The broken ground disguised a false floor created by old, old, old, technology, since before the wandering mandalorian clans colonized the planet between their nomadic journeys—and long before they decided to stay.

And Venku, who couldn’t know what to expect except for the monster in the dark, lit up the under city caverns with the green and blue glow of two sabers—his mother’s heirlooms. Her light guided the way to what his uncle left behind.

But no monster greeted him—though the skeleton of a creature greater than ten _Aay’han_ lay across the old arena floor, it’s head blown to pieces if he were to judge the remnant by the scattered skull fragments around it.

The box was left where his uncle described, and he felt the warmth of love and pride trickle into his chest to swell around his heart. He reached down, grasped it by the sides, and slipped into the lock the compass Mereel had carried on a chain around his neck.

The lid slipped open, silent, and a _glow_ pierced the darkness—separate from the sabers he’d drawn, unique, like the look in his uncle’s eyes at night under the stars. The dim touch of fear—fear of the unknown, fear of knowledge, fear of waking something long slept—crept beneath his subconscious and stood the hairs at the back of his neck. Just as quick as the feeling came, it dissipated under a swell of warmth, of love, of reassurance—and the whispers of _secrets,_ and of _ash_ _._

He touched his glove to the crystal within and raised it from its cushion, secure in the knowledge that the Force would warn him from danger. It held a hum that tingled the tips of his fingers even through the gloves and whispered of the unknown. It settled, comforting and warm, in the hidden pocket above his heart, behind the plated armor over his chest.

 _“Vor’entye,”_ he said to the box. He couldn’t be sure just _who_ he thanked—uncle? mother? lingering ghosts?—but he felt the recede of awareness leave him like scattered cinders on the wind.

Venku exited the cavern alone, with his uncle’s secret pressed close to his chest.


	16. Sleeping on Someone

Everyone knew it as well as he did.

Mereel was a terrible influence, a terrible choice for commitment or anything that could be remotely related to it.

He’d lie, and lay, quiet, in the night, someone pressed up against him while he thought about the stars. The warmth was what he needed, the physical presence and comfort of someone there beside him, and it never mattered who.

He was taken anyway. Claimed. By one who had no hands but still held him. Old Mandalorian legends spoke of such a thing, but he declined to express his discovery with anyone who knew what that meant—because Mandalorians gave up such small, silly, beliefs long ago.

He’d see her at the corner of his eyes, watching while he dreamed of stars, and the best he could do was go out the day next, and wreak havoc in his wake.

That was just how it had to be, and he’d spent enough time convincing himself of it that, someday, he might even believe it to be true.

But until then, he’d take life a step at a time, one night after another, beside a warm body and soft hands.


	17. Family / Decisions

“Nothing about this makes sense,” she says by his ear, seated on his lap with knees bent at his hips on the ground.

He presses his closed eyes into the bare crux of neck and shoulder, nose to warm skin and mouth breathing slow.

“It doesn’t have to make sense.” He presses lips to her with his hands threaded together, resting over the dip of her lower back.

“You need to find someone real and settle down,” she continues, ignoring what he said.

“She is real.”

“I didn’t say she wasn’t.” He can feel her pause, knows the way her body moves when she considers her words.

He moves to intercept, lifting his head and insisting a kiss over parted lips. “Then let’s get married.”

Instant irritation in her eyes. This one hates being interrupted, would break the nose of any who dare, except for him.

“You’re already married,” she snaps, and then, eyes wide, she clicks her teeth shut.

“See?” he asks, like it answers the conversation.

“It’s not the same!” Her eyes roll up into her lids and her face grimaces, tight, along the edges. Like she’s about to cry.

“Don’t,” he says. “Don’t make that face.”

“You’re so _lonely,”_ she shudders, cheeks dry. “I feel it all the time. I just want you to find someone for you. Someone real.”

“She _is_ real.”

“No, she’s not.”

He buries his anger in a smile. “You saw her the other day.”

“It’s _not the same,”_ she snaps again, and her forehead bruises his—not quite hard enough to hurt longer than a couple seconds.

“I can’t expect you to understand,” he sighs. But she should. She she _should_ understand. Yet not even natural grown, born-into mandos, bother to try.

She says, “I won’t be here to relieve you when you fall.”

“The best part about falling is getting up and doing it again.”

_“Ori’vod—”_

“Don’t call me that,” he snaps suddenly, and he doesn’t know where the anger comes from. He takes a breath to steady himself and let’s it go.

“It makes this…” he motions his hand between their bodies, “…weird.”

“You are my _ori’vod_ first,” she says. “If I have to go back to just being _gar vod’ika_ so you can take me seriously, then I’ll do so in a heartbeat.”

“I _do_ take you seriously.”

“ _Atin’la shabuir,”_ her eyes screw shut and she trembles. “She’s going to get you killed.”

“Then I die.” He says it faster than he can think, than he can realize how that sounds. But the words are out and it’s too late to take them back.

They were the wrong thing to say.

She slides off his lap and gathers her clothes. “So you’ve already made your decision.”

“ _Cyar’ika—”_

“Stop, Mereel.” She slides on the bottom half of her flight suit, bare breasts still in view. “You only have one _cyar’ika,_ and she’s in the stars.”

She shrugs on the top half and slips the snaps shut. He watches her gather the rest of her things, slide on her boots, and walks out the door.

He considers following her, but he knows it’s pointless. What would he say? He can’t apologize for the truth, and she’s right, anyway.

But he can’t stop, he’s already too far gone.


	18. Innocence

Venku stands, slow, still finding his balance unsteady from time to time, and waves his arms open. He stands at 7 summers and growing fast by mandalorian standards, but his _Ree’vodu_ still watches him when he’s back from his _travels._ He’s not entirely sure why the adults say it funny.

But that’s okay, because Venku knows a secret he can’t say, too. No one knows but him, about his _Ree’vodu_ —and Mereel doesn’t know he knows.

 _Ba’vodu_ can’t have children of his own.

It’s not something he shared with the others—another private secret he’s kept for so long he’d forgotten he’d never told anyone—and Venku knows, somehow, that it never came up in discussion. The others all believed he didn’t want any, that he just couldn’t settle long enough for one.

But he knows. It wasn’t _Ree’vodu’_ s choice, but Mandalorians never cared about blood parentage, so it didn’t show. Venku didn’t know how to ask uncle Bardan without revealing the secret, so he didn’t.

It seemed pretty obvious to him. It was like a beacon of hurt in the chest of his uncle Mereel, yet uncle Bardan never seemed to separate it from the storm in his head.

“You still look ready to dive head first to the dirt,” Mereel laughed. “This is hard to watch.”

 _“Mir’sheb,”_ Venku grumbled.

“Oh, ow.” Mereel pressed a hand to the beacon left-of-center. “Where did you learn that _terrible_ phrase?”

 _“Ba’vodu?”_ Venku stilled, face turned to the sky. He could feel her again. She came and went when the skies cleared, a vague presence that encompassed all things. All life. The fabric of everything. It was strange.

“Which one? You have a clan full of _ba’vodu’e.”_

_“Oyu’baa’vodu?”  
_

He stilled. _Ree’vodu_ never stopped moving, not unless he was angry and ready to react, or shocked into stillness. Neither sat well with Venku and he immediately regretted it.

“Repeat,” his uncle hushed, tone dead and cold.

But he couldn’t. Venku suddenly felt overwhelmed, ready to cry and beat at the ground and run away. But _Ree’vodu_ would catch him and it was pointless anyway. His uncle would never hurt him, he felt it in the air, and there was no running from him.

“No,” Venku said, and closed his eyes behind his HUD.

He felt the swirl of sudden violent anger and confusion consume the sky and the earth and the stars and as it neared him…

…it died in the hollow of his uncle’s chest.

“Never say that again,” Mereel warned quietly, knelt down T-visor to T-visor. Venku had his breath stolen as he connected with the fear his people’s helmets cast on outsiders. The inability to locate his uncle’s eyes chilled him to the bone. “No one knows.”

“But _I_ know,” Venku blurted, hands fisted at his sides and frozen, afraid. The moment hung in the air, punctuated by the flair of the wind and the breaking cloud cover overhead.

His uncle looked up as the skies cleared to the glimmering stars through the evening atmosphere.

“You don’t,” he said. The visor came down to level back on Venku. “Go home.”

Venku couldn’t run fast enough.


	19. Knows me Better Than Myself

As a child, he’d been aware of more than the scope of his comprehension could allow. His brothers were his world, but distantly he knew his world was very small, and someone watched him where he couldn’t see.

When Kal’buir told the Mando legends of how the universe was created, when e told the old beliefs that Mand’alore joined the stars when they died, it hadn’t mattered that he prefaced the legends with the clarification that they were fiction.

It was all real to him, because he knew that some parts were true.

And so he took to sacrificing his body to the stars, rappelling in the rains of Kamino and shattering his legs. Setting dets in the old flooded cities and wreaking destruction in ruins.

Claiming bodies with his mouth and hands and breaking them alternately between pleasure and pain.

Pushed along by invisible touches and a stare that never left his side to direct his life in lines he might’ve never followed otherwise, had she not known him better than he yet knew himself. So that he might join her someday in the stars.


	20. Love at First Sight

“I love the sky,” he says.

It is a secret Mereel’s kept for some time—since the first he laid eyes on unbroken Kamino summer sky. The relief, and the pain, at finally admitting it out loud is palpable in his tone.

A’den looks at him with a sharp jerk of his head, like he’s stated something that made little sense. Or spoken in Huttese. But his brother doesn’t shrug, doesn’t turn away, doesn’t wave aside the things he says late at night beside him looking into the black. Just watches him, patient.

“Not just the sky,” he says, and it’s even true. “Every sky.”

“Even on Nal Hutta?” A’den asks, simple, with the barest of lilt to indicate a question. There’s no subdued teasing, no quiet mockery in the question like it would have if from another of his brothers.

So he considers it with a smile as he eases back on the curved spine of _Aay’han._

“Yes,” he says at length after he’s admired the shape of the stars through the lens of Mandalore’s atmosphere.

“More than the sky, then,” A’den supplies with a quiet twist of his mouth as he slides a holo back into his pocket. Mereel hadn’t seen him look at it, but he knew that if A’den wanted to share… well.

Another time, maybe. Secrets between brothers weren’t like those between friends, or family, or contacts or targets. They weren’t things to be bartered and twisted and traded in for bigger and better things. Secrets were shared, when the time felt right and another needed to be pulled in. Because trust was a thing that brothers worked on and held close and intimate, like his secret about the sky.

Like his love for the curve of the galaxy, the black that enveloped him, the stars that glowed, the blue that kissed the plastisteel windows of his ship in the midst of a jump.

“The galaxy is full of stars,” he says. “Fallen kings and queens.”

A streak of white crosses the night sky. His brother’s sharp inhale cuts the quiet with his surprise.

And in that moment, Mereel senses that A’den understands. “Do you mean…”

“Yes.” No hesitation, no stops, no misunderstandings.

His brother takes the statement in silence, palm over the pocket where he slipped away the holo. The stars sparkle and a soft wisp of blown snow from the tops of heavy laden trees pass in the wind, filling the silence with peaceful quiet.

“Tell me her story,” A’den says, low, quiet, sleep deprivation wringing his voice in tones.

“She had many names,” Mereel begins. “But all fell away as she stepped between her warring clans and, with her body, brought the fire that welded them as armor. As beskar, and arms, as bes’kads.

With the heart of her she drew them up and with her voice she rocked the plains, claiming first small settlements where before they had been scattered, and spread her hands to the stars.

She came upon an enclosed city whose foundations of idle stone would not shift to the tide, and there her sea of warriors battered upon its walls, breaching stone and defense under her name, rallied by her cry _naastla_. The war waged on for many nights, until she rose above the tide and shattered the battlements under her hand, scattering sun and stars and sky.”

Mereel chuckles and raises an arm, beckoning A’den closer. His brother concedes the distance and scoots in beside him, hand still over the holo in his pocket, and says nothing. Just nods, grave, serious, and watches the sky under critical eyes that seemed to scan for suspicious activity. He blinks, brows rising as if shocked by his own reaction, and it’s all Mereel can do not to laugh.

He manages a wide grin, warmed by his brothers concern, and once more the ache dissipates, the hole in his heart filled for the moment.

They fall into companionable silence to admire the sky well into the night. At the start of day, buried under heavy blankets tucked in close together and circled around them to keep them warm, they greet the morning under tired eyes and shared _aay’han._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All right, here we go
> 
> I took a couple different concepts and involved a good deal of word-play, interchanging definitions and meanings, and linked together different themes. The short of it is:
> 
> Mereel is in love with a dead woman, who is also the destroyer god, who encompasses the stars.
> 
> The long of it is:
> 
> In Mandalorian ancient religious beliefs / archaic practices, the universe was created by the destroyer god, Kad’Harangir in his battle against the god of stagnation, Arasuum.
> 
> Destruction is the creator that forces growth and change in the universe.
> 
> The archaic word for “star” is “ka’ra”, which also holds the meaning of: the council of fallen kings/queens (I’m assuming gender ambiguous language, due to the nature of mando’a).
> 
> Mand’alor’e, when they die, join the stars. Ergo, they join the council of fallen kings, who are part of / joined with the destroyer god.
> 
> Mandalore the Destroyer was a woman named Ranah teh Naast. But, due to her name, she is also an incarnation of the destroyer god.
> 
> She is also among the stars, due to aforementioned.
> 
> Then we have Mereel, who has an incredibly self-destructive personality, and willingly engages in needless self-destructive behavior. He destroys things in order to create or change something else.
> 
> And finally, in Star Wars mythos, powerful beings, such as force ghosts but not restricted to them, exist, and can reach across the void of death to influence things in the living world.
> 
> So, ultimately, this is a tragic love story. And it was a complete experiment, from start to finish.
> 
> I hope you enjoyed it. Please drop questions, comments, criticisms, and so on here or in my inbox or whatever. Thanks for reading.


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